Owen knelt, his palms resting on soft, damp topsoil, eyes trained on four very large eggs all propped up in a nest of carefully arranged dirt and leaves. As he watched, they started to shake and chirp as the creatures inside fought their way into open air.
He could hear excited whispers as his team behind him tried to get a better view, but immediately threw a sharp look over his shoulder and they backed off under his glare. He didn't blame them for wanting to see, but it was vital that he was the first thing the hatchings saw, that he was the one they imprinted on.
His attention immediately returned to the eggs as one of them finally cracked, and a tiny snout broke free with a squeak that Owen swore sounded triumphant. He scooted closer, peering at the hatchling even as its arms weakly struggled against the tough strands of inner membrane that bound the shell together.
"Come on," he whispered. "You got this."
It chirped and pushed, getting more than half its body out of the shell, then slumped over in exhaustion. Owen chuckled and slowly brushed away stray shell fragments before gingerly pulling the hatchling the rest of the way out of the egg. It was still very weak and half blind, but it would grow strong given time.
"Atta girl," Owen whispered with a smile, cradling the hatchling dino as gently as he could manage. He barely registered the all the cooing and gushing from his staff, already lost in his own little world.
As he peered down at the hatchling resting in his hands, the slitted gold eyes of a raptor stared back.
There were four.
All of them girls.
None of them real dinosaurs.
It had been made abundantly clear to Owen that to fill the gaps in the Raptor's DNA, fragments from modern-day animals had been used as a replacement.
The oldest one, for example, had these blue stripes running down her flanks that supposedly came from monitor lizard DNA (Owen was beginning to suspect she got the attitude as well, with how many times she snapped and clawed at him when he tried feeding her, even just hours after she'd hatched), while another one had green stripes from green iguana DNA.
Owen wasn't really sure about the other two, but then again, did it really matter? He was dealing with Raptors, and they were gonna be deadly no matter what other animals they were mixed with.
The Raptors grew insanely fast.
They were on their feet within hours of their birth. Outright running after a few days. For weeks they were hand-fed until one of them—the one Owen called Blue for the stripes down her flanks—figured out that human hands were made out of meat, too. Her teeth sunk right through the handler's protective leather gloves. The next day, the handler left behind his job and two fingers, and from then on the raptors were fed from the safety of the balcony of their enclosure.
As Owen said goodbye to a man he'd worked with for five years, an animal expert with over two decades of field experience, he realized just how much in over his head he was.
These weren't dogs or wolves or anything they were even remotely familiar with.
These were genetically engineered monsters. Highly intelligent with a mouth full of teeth and a bad attitude, they were every zoologist's worst nightmare.
The mission, as InGen put it, was to test the mental capacity of the Velociraptors.
Easier said than done.
For most animals, this meant simple tests like having them run through a maze, or memorizing the order in which buttons were pushed to activate a food dispenser. For the most part, human children performed better than the majority of young animals, although occasionally out-smarted by the older ones.
The Raptors, though, were a whole other animal.
Not even half-grown at four months, their intelligence was observed to have rivaled modern day corvids, more commonly known as the birds that think like humans. The problem solvers. Owen knew they'd only keep on getting smarter. As it was, they were consistently outperforming humans in nearly every intelligence test they were given. He wondered how long it would be before they grew too smart for him to handle.
If Owen hadn't showed up, there was no doubt that Blue would have been the Alpha. She was faster, stronger, and just plain smarter than her siblings. The extra aggression didn't hurt, either. Her siblings, Charlie, Delta, and Echo were infinitely easier to handle.
Whenever Owen gave his commands, she was the first to snap and screech at him, the first to try and see if she really couldn't reach the viewers' balcony if she jumped as high as she could (the first time she tried scared the shit out of him).
In their pig-hunting exercises, she was the one who would lead her siblings in for the kill, or at least try to before the pig would vanish into one of the many safety burrows in the enclosure, much to their constant frustration.
That wasn't to say that Blue's siblings had always followed her without question. When they were about five months old, after a squabble over a piece of meat, Echo had decided to challenge her for dominance in the pack. Blue didn't react too kindly and in the resulting fight, slashed Echo across the face, giving her a vicious scar and permanently offsetting her jaw.
There weren't any challenges after that.
Owen couldn't say he blamed them.
At six months, the Raptors stood as high as Owen's shoulder, easily large enough to hunt and kill dinosaurs at least three or four times their size. With a bite force of 1000 pounds per square inch and wicked sharp claws on every limb, a single misstep around these animals was sure to lead to death.
In his not-so-private opinion, Owen was hoping that Vic Hoskins would make just such a misstep.
Where Owen saw his beta and his pack, Vic saw living weapons and an ungodly amount of profit. Everything from his cocky arrogance to his callous dismissal of the Raptors had Owen itching to shatter his jaw and throw him out of the enclosure for good, but he was stuck with the insufferable man indefinitely because InGen had seen fit to grant him oversight of the Raptor project.
On good days, Vic would have the gall to jeer at Owen for not seeing the potential his Raptors had in dealing out bloodshed and terror, and Owen would grit his teeth and walk away. On bad days, Owen would barely be fighting the urge to show Vic firsthand just how bloodthirsty his girls really were. Something told him he wasn't the only one who harbored such sentiments against Vic.
Barry, Owen's partner-in-crime in running the Raptor enclosure, wanted nothing more than for Vic to leave the Raptors out of his military agenda. And lately, after the looks he'd been giving her while she was corralled, Echo looked like she wanted to drag Vic's entrails through the mud.
Owen honestly couldn't say he minded the second option.
When his girls were full-grown at nearly eight months, disaster struck.
One of the pigs had somehow gotten loose and just as the new guy had lassoed it from the balcony, Blue slammed into it, dragging the new guy straight over the railing into a 30-foot free-fall.
The kid had worked there for less than a week and Owen didn't even know his name, but the Raptors were looking at him like the biggest HappyMeal ever. Snarling their challenges, steadily advancing with teeth and claws at the ready. The kid had nowhere to run, and even if he did he'd never be fast enough.
Owen leapt into action. He slammed his palm against the button to open the steel gate. As soon as the opening was large enough he slipped under and into the enclosure, ignoring Barry's shouted warning. As he ran towards the worker, he heard the distinctive click of weaponry as the InGen men positioned on the balcony got the stunners primed and ready for fire.
Still running, he held out his hand and yelled, "No, no! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!"
And then he was face to face with a mouth full of teeth.
His mind went on overdrive.
"Blue," he said, his voice full of confidence that he didn't feel. "Stand down."